JIHAD UNSPUN has a strange and wildly inaccurate article on the Iraqi Jewish archive that was discovered under water in the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi secret police during the war and which is now in Washington D.C. awaiting (funding for) final restoration:

Ancient Jewish library Stolen From Baghdad
Jun 12, 2004

It wasn't "stolen," it was taken to where there were facilities to conserve it. All above board. If that hadn't been done, the article would be saying it was left to rot in a war zone.

Baghdad - Iraqi sources have revealed that the Zionist foreign intelligence apparatus known as the Mossad had laid its hands on an ancient Jewish library that was held by the former Iraqi intelligence.

The sources said that a special Mossad team a few days after the fall of the former Iraqi regime in April last year visited Baghdad and seized the library in cooperation with the American CIA officers.

The military unit that found the archive was the Mobile Exploration Team Alpha, from the U.S. Army.

The ancient Jewish library contained precious and priceless copies of the Torah and the Talmud in addition to other writings in Hebrew that dated back 2,500 years.

The archive included a damaged Torah scroll, but early reports of a seventh-century copy of the Talmud proved to be unfounded, although rumors continue to circulate that it exists and remains to be found. I'm skeptical. The manuscripts are dated to the 16th-20th centuries C.E. None go back 2500 years or anything close. For a detailed account of the archive, go here.

The Jews taken captive into Baghdad at that time during the Babylon era wrote down their scriptures while in captivity.

Well, edited some of them anyway and wrote others. I don't have time to go into the details right now, and they're not well understood.

The sources said that the American forces arrested the person responsible for the library after their occupation of that Arab country and forced him to open the doors of the cellar where the library was kept underneath the Iraqi intelligence apparatus' building.

The library was submerged in water after the bursting of the water pipes in the cellar but the books were intact, the sources said, adding that the library was carried in a direct flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv.

Their sources are pretty poorly informed. The archive was badly damaged by the water, but it sounds as though much of it is recoverable. As for their location, this A.P. article says:

A salvage crew heaped the documents in piles, loaded them into sacks and took them to a nearby courtyard, where they were partly dried. Later they were packed into 27 metal trunks and stored in a refrigerated truck to halt the mold.

They were then shipped to Texas, where they were freeze-dried to stop the remaining moisture from causing further damage. They are now at a National Archives laboratory.

That would put them in Washington D.C., as the opening of the article indicates.

I've been following this story here for over a year. If you want to know more about it, go to this post and just keep following the links back.